Note: This is a slightly edited version of the second half of a paper that our colleague Mary Eberstadt gave at Hillsdale College’s conference, “The Sixties,” on January 30. The first half, explaining the overall thesis and the first two paradoxes may be read here. – Robert Royal

A third paradox has become the dominant social media soap opera of our time, a story that goes like this: The revolution was supposed to empower women. Instead, it ushered in the secular sex scandals of 2017 etc., and the #MeToo movement. In addition to the fact that it made marriage harder for many women to achieve, it also licensed sexual predation on a scale not seen outside of conquering armies.

Take Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, who died last year. His commercial empire was founded, of course, on pornographic photos of a great many women. He made himself an exemplar of his own supposed philosophy – the Playboy philosophy of sophisticated drinks and music and, naturally, easy sex. It was an idea that caught on quickly, and it seems safe to guess that most people didn’t know the sordid truth, which would later emerge from the Playboy mansion and elsewhere, about the exploitation behind the slick advertising.

Nonetheless, when Hefner died, many progressives, including self-styled feminists, glowed with praise for the apostle of the revolution. Why? Because he cloaked his predatory designs in the language of sexual progressivism. As a Forbes writer summarized the record, “Playboy published its first article supporting the legalization of abortion in 1965, eight years before the Roe v. Wade decision that permitted the practice – and even before the feminist movement had latched onto the cause. It also published the numbers of hotlines that women could call and get safe abortions.”

In other words, Hefner’s support for these causes appears inextricably tied up with his desire to live in a way that exploited women. This same Siamese twinning joins many of the secular sex scandals that have been exploding in the news. The Weinstein etc. stories revealed the same strategic role occupied by abortion for numerous men who objectify women and disdain monogamy. Without the backup plan of fetal liquidation, where would such men be? In court, of course, and paying lots of child support.

More and more thinkers, even outside the religious sphere, have come to the same conclusion. The sexual revolution did not deliver on its promises to women; instead, it further enabled men – especially men without the best of intentions. Francis Fukuyama, a non-religious social scientist, wrote almost twenty years in his 1999 book The Great Disruption: “One of the greatest frauds perpetrated during the Great Disruption was the notion that the sexual revolution was gender-neutral, benefiting women and men equally. . . . In fact the sexual revolution served the interests of men, and in the end put sharp limits on the gains that women might otherwise have expected from their liberation from traditional roles.”

With that observation, Fukuyama joins a long and growing list of non-religious thinkers who can now grasp more clearly, in retrospect, what some religious leaders have been saying all along. The revolution effectively democratized sexual predation. No longer did one have to be a king, or a master of the universe in some other realm, to sexually abuse or harass women in unrelenting, serial fashion. One only needed a world in which many women would be assumed to use contraception, and would further be deprived of male protectors. In other words, all one needed was the world delivered by the revolution.

A fourth paradox has barely been studied, at least not systematically, and needs to be: the effect of the revolution on Christianity itself. To look back over the decades is to understand that the revolution has been, simultaneously, polarizing the churches within, and creating tighter ties among some different denominations than ever before.

For decades now, commentators have argued over what “the Sixties” meant for the churches. Some have welcomed the innovations of Vatican II, for example; others have hailed the radical theological transformations of Mainline Protestantism. Still others deplored these changes. Wherever they have stood, though, observers of Christianity today have come to find one central fact unavoidable. The sexual revolution is the single most divisive issue now afflicting faith itself.

And this is true whether one’s Catholic or Protestant. In 2004, A Church at War, by Stephen Bates, a book about the Anglican Communion, summarized the argument on its back cover: “Will the politics of sex tear Anglicans and Episcopalians apart?” A few years later, writing of the same subject in Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity, William Murchison concluded with this observations: “For Episcopalians, as for large numbers of other Christians, the paramount issues are sex and sexual expression, neither viewed by the culture as means to a larger end but as the end.”

In his 2015 book Onward, Russell Moore reflected on the tension between evangelical progressives and traditionalists thus: “when it comes to religion in America at the moment, progress always boils down to sex.”

As in our other examples, it seems safe to say that today’s divisiveness wasn’t anything that Christians of the 1960s wanted to embrace. Those voices within the churches decades ago who just wanted Christianity to “loosen up” didn’t know what they were starting, which is today’s figurative civil war, across denominations, within the faith itself.

A fifth, and for now, final paradox: The sexual revolution didn’t stop at sex. What many people thought would be a private transformation of relations between individuals has gone on to radically reconfigure not only family life, but life, period.

Perhaps the least understood of the revolution’s effects are what might be called the macrocosmic implications – the way in which it continues to transform and deform not only individuals, but society and politics as well.

Some of these changes are demographic: across much of the developed world, families are smaller and more splintered from within than ever before in history.

Some effects are political: Smaller and more fractured families have put unprecedented pressure on the welfare states of the West, by reducing the tax base required to sustain it.

There are also social effects that are only beginning to be mapped, like the sharp rise in people living alone, or reporting greatly reduced human contact, or in other measures that make up the burgeoning field of “loneliness studies” – and this too takes place across the countries of the West.

Then there’s the spiritual fallout, which also couldn’t have been foreseen in the Sixties – especially by those arguing that something about a changed moral paradigm for Christians would somehow help them to be better Christians.

I have argued elsewhere that the revolution has also given rise to a new secularist, quasi-religious faith – the most potent such body of rival beliefs since Marxism-Leninism. According to this new faith, sexual pleasure is the highest good, and there is no clear moral standard beyond consenting adults and whatever they choose to do with one another. Whether they are conscious of it or not, many modern people treat the sexual revolution as religious bedrock – off-limits for revision, no matter what consequences it has wrought.

These are just some examples of the new world that needs mapping, and that will absorb intellectual attention for a long time to come. We should be hopeful about those future efforts. After all, it’s taken over fifty years for opinion to re-align about just some of the revolution’s negative legacy. It may take fifty more, or a hundred, for a full and honest empirical and intellectual accounting. Revisionist thinking about the revolution’s effects in the world has only just begun.

In summary, one parting thought. The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy was once sent out by a journal to report back on what happened in a local slaughterhouse. What he saw there moved him deeply. His subsequent description included an immortal line that I think applies widely to us today. After relaying the facts, Tolstoy observed with devastating simplicity, “We cannot pretend we don’t know these things.”

That is exactly where humanity is in 2018 with respect to the sexual revolution. We can no longer pretend we don’t know these things – these things that the revolution has done.

In the heady 1960s, many could plead ignorance, in good faith, about the fallout to come. Few could have suspected how many millions of children in coming generations would grow up without fathers in the home, say; or how many more millions would be aborted; or how many men and women alike from fractured homes would go on to suffer in diverse ways, such as turning to drugs – surely there’s more going on in the opioid epidemic than mere marketing – and other self-destructive behaviors.

Many people, just half a century ago, hoped that the revolution would incur no collateral human damage. And in fairness to them: who, back then, could have foreseen the library of social science created over the fifty years since, demonstrating just some of the human damage out there among men, women, and children of the revolution?

Some people fifty years ago even hoped that the new freedoms, and technological controls, would stabilize marriage itself. The 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which also reaches its 50th anniversary this year, went on to become widely despised across the decades precisely for predicting otherwise – precisely for insisting that the revolution would hurt romance and family, and end up licensing predatory men and malignant governments.

It is a paradox within a paradox right now that a great many people, including inside the Catholic Church itself, have ferociously resisted Humanae Vitae’s rejection of the revolution – or for that matter, any rejection of the revolution – despite all this evidence, even in some pretty high places.

By 2018, can any of us really, in good faith, pretend we don’t know these things that empiricism itself has documented? The answer has to be no.

In 1953, when the first issue of Playboy arrived on newsstands, many people might have wanted to believe its hype about enhancing the sophistication and urbanity of American men. By 2018, we can’t pretend that the mainstreaming of pornography has been anything but a disaster for romance, and a prime mover of today’s divorces and other breakups.

In 1973, even supporters of Roe vs. Wade could not have imagined the evidence to come: some 58 million never-born micro-humans in the United States; and gender-cide, or the selective killing of micro-girls for being girls, in various nations around the world, also numbering in the millions. Nor could supporters back then have imagined the technological leap that would unveil the truth about abortion once and for all: the sonogram.

Can today’s advocates for Roe possibly claim the same unknowing?

To face facts squarely, and use them to tell a truthful story, is not merely to deliver a jeremiad: it is to empower. To reject living under the falsehoods about the revolution, even if they have become the dominant narrative of the age, is to embrace the freedom to write a new narrative – and a truer one.

Just one step is needed toward revising the revolution’s legacy in the direction of truth: ceasing to pretend that we don’t know the empirical and historical record, when every year just reveals it both to science and human reason, more and more.

Mary Eberstadt

Mary Eberstadt is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute. Some of her previous The Catholic Thing columns (and columns by others in which her work is discussed) can be found here. She is the author of several books including It’s Dangerous to Believe and How the West Really Lost God.

The tide is turning — the forces that are arrayed against these giants are growing.

The US government has used anti-trust laws to break up monopolies. They ought to break up Facebook. Section 2 of the Sherman Act highlights particular results deemed anti-competitive by nature and prohibits actions that ‘shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.’ Couldn’t the same be applied to information? The United States government took down Standard Oil, Alcoa, Northern Securities, the American Tobacco Company and many others without nearly the power that Facebook has.

Read my latest over at The American Thinker. We are seeing an unprecedented erosion in our First Amendment rights, increasingly prohibiting the flow of ideas and free expression in the public square (social media). Run by left-wing self-possessed snowflakes, social media giants are indulging their worst autocratic impulses. And because they can, it is getting worse. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Mark Zuckerberg

“Facebook’s Use of Personal Data Ruled Illegal by German Court,” by Lucas Nolan, Breitbart, February 13, 2018:

A German court recently ruled that Facebook’s use of users’ personal data is illegal.

Reuters reports that a German court has ruled that Facebook’s use of user personal data is illegal as the company did not sufficiently secure consent from users. The Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZVB) that Facebook’s terms of service and its default user settings breached consumer law. Heiko Duenkel, the litigation officer at VZVB stated: “Facebook hides default settings that are not privacy-friendly in its privacy center and does not provide sufficient information about it when users register.”

Facebook stated that they had made significant changes to their terms of service and data protection guidelines since the case was brought against them in 2015, and promised to appeal the ruling saying, “We are working hard to ensure that our guidelines are clear and easy to understand, and that the services offered by Facebook are in full accordance with the law.” The company also plans to update their data protection guidelines and terms of service to comply with new rules introduced by the European Union that are set to take effect in June 2018.

Germany’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has also taken issue with Facebook and has begun their own investigation into the social media platform. The FCO said in December that they objected to the method Facebook uses to access third-party data when an account is registered on their site. Facebook collects information from both WhatsApp and Instagram — both companies owned by Facebook — when a new user registers. The FCO also took issue with an element of Facebook’s mobile app which automatically revealed users locations to other users on the app….

To repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 and amendments to that Act.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
January 3, 2017

Mr. Massie (for himself and Mr. Gohmert) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

A BILL

To repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 and amendments to that Act.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1.SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the “Safe Students Act”.

SEC. 2. REPEAL OF THE GUN-FREE SCHOOL ZONES ACT OF 1990 AND AMENDMENTS TO THAT ACT.

(a) In General.—Section 922 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by striking subsection (q).
(b) Related Amendments.—

(1) Section 921(a) of such title is amended by striking paragraphs (25) through (27) and redesignating paragraphs (28), (29), and (32) through (35) as paragraphs (25) through (30), respectively.
(2) Section 924(a) of such title is amended—

(A) in paragraph (1)(B), by striking “(k), or (q)” and inserting “or (k)”; and
(B) by striking paragraph (4) and redesignating paragraphs (5) through (7) as paragraphs (4) through (6), respectively.

The latest mass shooting, this time at a Florida high school, was one of the deadliest school shootings since the Columbine massacre in 1999.

So far, there have been 17 confirmed deaths in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the alleged shooter is in custody.

Americans are understandably searching for answers to stem this terrible epidemic.

Unfortunately, as always, many jump immediately to the conclusion that guns and protection of gun rights are what’s fueling the recurrence of these crimes. Some suggested that any opposition to gun control legislation is outright immoral.

But the often sincere and certainly passionate claims made by those calling for gun control frequently don’t add up.

As columnist David French wrote of the recurring shootings in a brilliant column for National Review, “It’s horrifying, and governmental solutions are hard to find. Twitter’s fondest wishes to the contrary, the unique characteristics of mass shootings mean that they often escape the reach of public policy.”

After the Parkland shooting, a number of old and new myths about the Second Amendment and gun control became media narratives. Here are just a few of the more common ones.

1. There Have Already Been 18 Mass Shootings in 2018

While school shootings are a serious problem, there have been frequent exaggerations about just how common they are.

One story that has gained widespread traction is that the Parkland shooting is the 18th school shooting since the beginning of 2018. This statistic was originally cooked up by Everytown for Gun Safety, a pro-gun control nonprofit.

Several of these “shootings” were individuals committing suicide on campus and many others were of stray bullets passing through classroom walls with no injuries taking place. In only a few cases were people other than the shooter actually harmed.

“[O]f the 17 ‘school shootings’ before Wednesday’s shooting; three students died; roughly 30-35 were injured,” according to The Daily Wire.

Even The Washington Post said the Everytown number was “a horrifying statistic. And it is wrong.”

“Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings,” according to The Washington Post.

2. Trump Signed a Bill That Makes It Easier for Mentally Ill People to Get Guns

This story spread rapidly after President Donald Trump tweeted out that the Parkland shooter was “mentally disturbed” and that more vigilance was necessary to stop these people before they engage in mass killings.

However, this stretched the truth.

Last year, Trump and Congress used the Congressional Review Act to overturn an Obama-era regulation that among other things could prevent those who received disability payments from Social Security from purchasing firearms.

The rule brought up serious charges that it was not just a violation of the Second Amendment, but Fourth Amendment due process rights.

“No administrative process and no administrative law judge should be able to take away a constitutional right,” Heritage Foundation senior fellow Hans von Spakovsky said when the rule was repealed. “This should exclusively be a regular court of law to determine if someone is disabled enough to pose a hazard with a gun, not a federal bureaucrat.”

As Reason editor Scott Shackford wrote, the rule did not specifically prevent mentally ill people from getting guns. Instead, it threw a wide, potentially unconstitutional net over people who may be no threat to themselves or others.

“[T]he regulation was opposed not just by National Rifle Association (NRA) but by several mental health and disability groups and by the American Civil Liberties Union,” Shackford wrote.

3. More Guns Means More Crime

One of the most frequent and persistent myths about guns is that the increase of guns in society leads to more crimes or violence in general. However, this hasn’t been the case. Studies demonstrate that gun control laws have not had a noticeable impact in reducing murder rates and violent crime.

As numerous studies have shown, gun ownership is not necessarily connected to crime rates, and may make crime go down. A 2016 report from the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action noted that:

As gun ownership has risen to an all-time high, the nation’s total violent crime rate has fallen to a 44-year low and the murder rate has fallen to an all-time low. Since 1991, when violent crime hit an all-time high, the nation’s violent crime rate and its murder rate have decreased by more than half, as Americans have acquired over 170 million new guns, roughly doubling the number of privately owned guns in the United States.

Sean Davis at The Federalist explained the wide gap between the effort required to buy simple produce and pretty much any firearm. Davis Wrote:

There are no federal laws requiring onion dealers to register with the federal government prior to selling onions. There are no state laws requiring that you apply for and receive an onion purchase permit, complete with background check, prior to purchasing an onion. There are no onion waiting periods or limits on how many onions you can purchase within a certain period of time. Nor are there, to my knowledge, any state or local laws prohibiting the possession of onions in schools or government buildings.

The fact is, there are numerous hurdles to gun ownership. It’s not something that can be done on an immediate whim.

5. Gun Control Works in Other Countries

A frequent claim by gun control advocates is that other countries have stemmed gun violence through strict gun control laws.

Australia, in particular, is used as an example for the U.S., as Obama did in 2015.

“We know that other countries in response to one mass shooting have managed to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours,” he said.

Of course, this comparison doesn’t calm the fears of many who believe that so-called moderate, “commonsense” gun control solutions are merely a Trojan horse leading to mass confiscation as happened in Australia.

Even so, the evidence that the law made a huge impact in gun violence is unclear. As a University of Melbourne report concluded in 2008, according to National Review, “There is little evidence to suggest that [the Australian mandatory gun-buyback program] had any significant effects on firearm homicides.”

The report said:

Although gun buybacks appear to be a logical and sensible policy that helps to placate the public’s fears the evidence so far suggests that in the Australian context, the high expenditure incurred to fund the 1996 gun buyback has not translated into any tangible reductions in terms of firearm deaths.

While Australia experienced a dip in firearm deaths after passing the 1996 law, so has the U.S. since the early 1990s, even as we moved in the opposite policy direction.

6. The Second Amendment Is Obsolete and Doesn’t Apply Today

Many gun control advocates acknowledge that the Second Amendment is a serious impediment to heavy-handed restrictions on firearms and confiscations and have advocated a repeal of this part of the Bill of Rights.

Others, however, have insinuated that the Second Amendment doesn’t apply today because the firearms used by the Founding Fathers were muskets, and that they couldn’t possibly have conceived of the devastating effectiveness of modern weaponry.

But the Founders did not design the Constitution to be an ephemeral document that would lose its applicability over time. They were quite aware that technological changes would come long after they were gone. They designed the Second Amendment to preserve the individual right to self-defense, just as they created the First Amendment to protect free expression.

William Blackstone, a British legal theorist whom the Founders often relied on for guidance, wrote, “Self-defense … as it is justly called the primary law of nature, so it is not, neither can it be in fact, taken away by the law of society.”

It was this reasoning that prompted the Founders to include the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

Just as the rise of the internet and new communication technologies do not make the First Amendment invalid, the principles of the Second Amendment apply today, even as firearm technology has advanced.

Many studies show that news coverage and publicity surrounding school shootings only serve to increase their frequency. As Reason’s Robby Soave pointedly asked on Twitter, does this mean that it’s time to crack down on the First Amendment? A form of “news control,” so to speak.

It is reasonable for Americans to be wary of policy proposals that would likely be ineffective, yet would negate our most precious individual rights.

This article has been updated to correct the year in which the Columbine massacre occurred.

It is unfortunate for Europe and the World that so many countries have decided to support antisemitism and ‘Judenrein‘ and are substituting their Jewish population for a Muslim population. Israel is the only ‘safe harbor’ for Jews in a sea of rising antisemitism.

The last time Hitler, Nazi Germany and Europe exploded with antisemitism it didn’t turn out well. It will be worse this time.

Friday, January 12, 2018. Sarcelles. A city in the northern suburbs of Paris. A 15-year-old girl returns from high school. She wears a necklace with a star of David and a Jewish school uniform. A man attacks her with a knife, slashes her face, and runs away. She will be disfigured the rest of her life.

January 29, again in Sarcelles, an 8-year-old boy wearing a Jewish skullcap is kicked and punched by two teenagers.

A year earlier, in February, 2017, in Bondy, two young Jews wearing Jewish skullcaps were severely beaten with sticks and metal poles. One of the Jews had his fingers cut with a hacksaw.

[ … ]

Politicians also see that the country’s 600 “no-go zones” are growing; that radicalized Muslims may kill, and that violent riots can break out at any time. In France, more than 500 people were murdered or maimed by Islamic terrorists in less than four years.

Six years ago, the author Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacement (“The Great Replacement”), a book noting that Jews and Christians are not only being replaced by Muslims, but that they are often harassed and persecuted. He lamented the destruction of churches and described attacks on Jews as a “slow pogrom”. He was condemned for “inciting hatred”.

Recently, journalist Éric Zemmour observed that in Muslim neighborhoods, Muslims are now living “according to their own laws” and forcing non-Muslim people to leave. He was found guilty of “incitement” and fined.

A reporter who recently made a documentary about French Muslim neighborhoods, concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist organizations are quickly taking hold of French Muslim communities while spreading hatred towards the Jews and the West, and that they own many schools where jihad is taught .

The French government, he added, is financing these schools and is therefore complicit in sowing the seeds of a devastation that could easily go beyond the destruction of France’s Jews. “The occupation of the West,” he said, “will be done without war but quietly, with infiltration and subversion.” No French television station has broadcast it, nor plans to. The documentary was aired only in Israel.

Anti-Israel demonstrations support terrorism. People shout, “Death to the Jews,” but those people are never arrested for “hate speech”.

Polls show that the unhindered dissemination of Muslim anti-Semitism and the violence that results from it has led to the rise of widespread anti-Semitism that clearly recalls dark periods of history.

A growing percentage of the French say that the Jews in France are “too numerous” and “too visible.”

It’s no secret The Democratic Party has a tendency to cozy up to socialists, but how far left have they really become? To find out, Ami Horowitz took to the streets of New York to debut America’s most exciting (and disturbing) game show: Communist Manifesto or Democratic Party Platform!

Our Founders were very clear that they intended naturalization to be controlled by the federal government instead of by the states, as it had been under the Articles of Confederation, because they wanted stricter standards, not looser standards. While there were several motivations for this principle, the overarching reason was that they wanted to ensure the voting populace would consist of those who shared our democratic-republican values.

Even though immigrants back then were all from the same European stock as the current Americans, Theodore Sedgewick said during the debate on the 1790 naturalization bill that “their sensations, impregnated with prejudices of education, acquired under monarchical and aristocratical Governments, may deprive them of that zest for pure republicanism, which is necessary in order to taste its beneficence with that gratitude which we feel on the occasion.” Madison spoke of admitting only those “who are attached to our Country by its natural and political advantages.”

Jefferson feared they would “bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth…These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”

The solution to this problem is having a gradual and balanced immigration system based on merit and shared values. Instead, the endless cycles of illegal immigration, amnesties, and back-door amnesty-style programs (asylum, temporary protected status, refugees), in conjunction with chain migration, has made our immigration system work for foreigners, not for citizens, realizing the worst nightmares of our founders.

Look no further than California to understand how immigration done wrong can lead to a permanent majority of anti-life, pro-big-government Democrats. The problem is that many other states are headed down the same path, in a slower but inexorable trajectory. If the same policies continue, if chain migration is not immediately halted, conservatives will find themselves in the minority nationwide, and no other issue will matter. Even though the Republican Party is not conservative, it is perceived as such and should take heed of the obvious warning signs.

No, this is not like the great immigration wave of the last century

There has been a lot of focus in recent years on the number of green cards issued each year, but not on the number of people becoming citizens. Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has admitted roughly 700,000-800,000 citizens into our voting population every year, with a few years reaching one million. Most of them have come from countries with dramatically different worldviews on issues such as guns, health care, and the size of government. Many deniers within the GOP of the political problems of mass migration point to past history and saying our previous large wave of immigration didn’t create a permanent liberal majority. But that is because we are now dwarfing the previous great wave in numbers.

Even during the highest naturalization years of the great wave, we admitted anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 new citizens to our electorate. In other words, even during the great wave, when there were some years we admitted roughly as many annual immigrants as we do today, that era of immigration didn’t result in as many people becoming citizens. Some of this had to do with life expectancy, but either way, the wave didn’t result in nearly as many naturalizations. And even the peak period of naturalization was not only much smaller but only lasted for a short period of time.

From 1996 to 2013, 12,609,174 new immigrants became citizens. During the actual great wave, the number of naturalizations was still very low because it took time for them to go through the system and become citizens. But even if you take an equivalent 18-year period with the highest level of naturalizations, which was from 1928 to1945, just 3,835,758 immigrants were naturalized. In other words, while the immigration wave of the modern era was 66 percent larger than the great wave, the “naturalization wave” was 329 percent greater.

Moreover, we have not even actualized the full extent of this wave of immigration, which is still growing.

Finally, let’s not forget that because of the shutoff in the ’20s, the peak of naturalizations resulting from the great wave coincided with a cool-off in new immigration. Contrast that to today’s wave of naturalizations that are coinciding with an even larger wave of new admissions from similar areas. This ensures a lack of assimilation into our constitutional values. Although immigrants have always voted for more liberal politicians, enough of them were moving on to the second generation and becoming conservatives. The ’30s and ’40s, when the highest numbers of great wave immigrants were becoming voting members of society, was the lowest of our new immigration levels. As noted immigration historian Maldwyn Allen Jones observed, “With reinforcements no longer arriving from across the ocean, ties with Europe were gradually weakened and memories of the old life grew dimmer with each passing year.” This dynamic “accelerated the Americanization of those groups which had come earlier.”

That is changing because the numbers are too great, the welfare state too expansive, and the immigrants dramatically and disproportionately coming from impoverished lands.

Let’s explore the results of this wave as it relates to critical states electorally, and you will see why it is so hard for Republicans to crack the blue firewall. This is somewhat old data, and the trajectory is growing every year:

What is self-evident from this data is not only the danger of Republicans losing places like Texas, Florida, and Arizona. It’s not only an explanation of why Republicans lost Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada. It also foreshadows what will happen to North Carolina, Georgia, and beyond. As late as 1990, the foreign-born population of Virginia was just five percent. It swelled to 11.4 percent in 2010 and is still surging, as high as 12.3 percent in 2016. While Virginia has experienced an influx of already-American liberals over the past two decades, that would only explain why it’s a marginal red state or even a purple state, not why it’s become a blue state.

Now take a look at the numbers and recent trajectory from Georgia. Again, there is an influx of American white liberals from other states as well as a general increase in black turnout. But immigration is what is going to paint those states purple.

Trump talks about shutting off chain migration 10 to 15 years from now, but the reality is that just the existing trajectory will paint the map blue.

While not every state will become as blue as California, the lessons of the Golden State should be a stark warning for what happens with salad-bowl rather than melting-pot immigration. Orange County, California, was once the bread basket of GOP dominance in California. As late as 1988, George H.W. Bush won more than twice as many votes as Democrat Michael Dukakis there. As late as 2004, when the broader state was long gone, George W. Bush won it by 20 points. Republicans narrowly carried it for the next two elections, until they downright lost it by 8 points in 2016.

What happened? In 1980, 12.7 percent of the county was foreign-born. In 2016, an estimated 30 percent of the county was foreign-born, and 45.6 percent of its residents speak a foreign language at home. Orange County, California, will now be blue forever.

Although California is lost forever, Texas and Florida are both independently vital to the GOP’s relevance. Dallas County, Texas, for example, has gone from 5 percent foreign-born in 1980 to 23 percent in 2016. Reagan won the county by 59.2 percent in 1980, while Trump lost it by a whopping 26 points in 2016. Sure, some of this has to do with Trump’s particular weakness with some college-educated urban/suburban white voters, and he has compensated for it by running up margins elsewhere. But the influx of unprecedented immigration has gradually and relentlessly shifted a number of counties to the Democrats over the past few elections.

One cannot escape the conclusion that unless there is a cool-off on overall immigration, the unprecedented size and duration of this wave, constantly reinforcing itself, will ensure that there are not enough second-generation voters assimilating into constitutional values to offset the new influx voting for big government. This is a clear distinction from past waves of immigration.

Of course, conservatives need to reach out to all new voters from all parts of the world to sell their message. But numbers and time matter greatly. Constitutional values can be sold to a melting pot of Americans; it will not resonate with a salad bowl.

The bottom line is this: There are many good policy reasons to cool down mass migration at this point. We need a more balanced immigration system for cultural, economic, and security reasons. But for Republicans who don’t care about policy and only care about political survival, they must understand that unless they change their tune on immigration and do so immediately, they and their party will become completely irrelevant.

We don’t know the student’s name, but we do know that he hit a nerve — in fact, he hit a whole bunch of them. Identified only as a boy of Asian descent at C.K. McClatchy High School in California, the teen’s recent science-fair project, “Race and IQ,” propounded the thesis that differences in groups’ average intelligence influence their academic performance. He couldn’t win, though, because his project was removed after parents, staff and other students became “upset” and one girl said she felt “unsafe and uneasy.” The irony?

A project on evolution would no doubt have been well received — even though an assumption of racial differences is implicit in evolutionary theory.

In fact, The Sacramento Bee, which hasn’t yet evolved out of the progressive primordial soup, mentioned that the student’s thesis is associated with eugenics (which the Bee casts negatively), the science of improving the human race via selective breeding. The paper is likely unaware, however, that the term “eugenics” itself was coined by Sir Francis Galton — a cousin of famed evolutionist Charles Darwin — and that Galton made clear that in his eugenicist endeavors, he was merely building on his cousin’s work.

Philosopher G.K. Chesterton once noted that if people “were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal.” This is easy to understand:

What are the chances that different groups could have “evolved” isolated from one another for eons — subject to different environments, stresses, procreation-influencing cultural imperatives and adaptive realities — and ended up identical in every worldly measure? Why, even if the peoples evolved isolated in identical environments, the separation alone would make the prospects of winding up completely “equal” a virtual statistical impossibility.

Whatever you believe about evolution, it’s clear that equality is not a thing of this world. Do we see it in nature? Some species can dominate others or are more adaptable, which is why the rat is a pest and the dodo is extinct (and, in fact, the rat helped drive the dodo to extinction). Even within species, some members are hardier, smarter, faster or stronger than others. There are alphas and betas, with a silverback gorilla running his troop and a dominant lion leading his pride. And different breeds of dogs have different characteristic traits, with some being more intelligent than others.

As for people, how is it that we can even characterize different groups as “groups”? Since we don’t do it based purely on location (e.g., dividing 10 boys into two groups of five, each on opposite sides of a room), we can only do so because there are differences among them. We can only speak of “men” and “women” because sex differences actually exist. Regarding the races, we know there are distinctions relating to skin color and hair, for example. It’s differences that make groups “groups.”

But are the differences only skin deep? Tay-Sachs disease is most common among Ashkenazi Jews, while sickle cell anemia is almost exclusive to people of Middle Eastern, Indian, Mediterranean and African heritage. Relative to American whites, American blacks generally have longer limbs, more sweat glands (and thus dissipate heat better), narrower pelvises and greater bone density; and black men have higher free testosterone levels than white men do. Not that it’s the focus of this article, but all these characteristics bring advantages and disadvantages.

Now, next question: Are the differences only neck high? If evolution is a reality, would its principles be operational with the body but, somehow, some way, be suspended with the brain? My, believing that would truly take faith.

Of course, whether nature, nurture or both — whether the tests are valid or not — the fact remains that we do see marked IQ differences among groups. Ashkenazi Jews score the highest of all, at 115 (the world average is currently about 88); this may explain why Jews are only 0.2 percent of the world’s population but were 22 percent of the 20th century’s Nobel Prize winners. Hong Kong and Singapore lead the country list with average IQs of 108, while many nations register far, far lower. Note that while good scientists may debate why these differences exist and how meaningful they are, that they exist is not in dispute.

Of course, some may quibble with the numbers I provided or the group differences I cited, but the details aren’t really the point. The point is, again, that evolution and Equality Dogma contradict one another. Embracing both is akin to believing it likely that on two different occasions, you could spin a giant bin with one million numbers in it, remove them randomly and put them in a row, and they would end up in the precise same order each time. Random processes yield variable results.

That is, unless you believe that God guided evolution. Even this belief, however, allows for the inequality that is the world’s apparent norm. How could this be? It’s simple: Equality is our hang-up — not God’s.

Is “equality” emphasized in any great, time-tested religious canon? It’s certainly only mentioned in the Bible in reference to weights and measures. In fact, Christian theology holds that in that perfect, sinless realm of happiness — Heaven — we will not all have equal glory, as St Thérèse of Liseaux once explained.

As for this fold, Hell on Earth is what Equality Dogma helps create. It has spawned perverted scientific priorities that deny Truth and demand ideological determinations. We’ve seen this before. The Soviet equality dogmatists did it with Lysenkoism, insisting that acquired traits could be inherited because Marxist ideology demanded a malleable human nature. The Nazi superiority dogmatists did it with their racial theories, believing in a “master race” that could become all the more masterful through selective breeding. And we’ve combined elements of both, demanding an unnatural and unattainable equality and measuring it by racial, ethnic and sexual representation in worldly endeavor.

In a saner time, Equality Dogma would be considered a vile heresy. The truth here isn’t hard to grasp: There are differences within groups, but there are also differences among groups. We know we mustn’t paint every individual with the same brush. Why would we paint every individual group with the same one?

One group we should paint over with the label “Rejected” is equality dogmatists. The McClatchy student’s scientific methods might very well have been shoddy, but this wasn’t what got his project scuttled. Rather, The Sacramento Bee article quoted individuals who said the it was “shocking” and its creator “closed-minded”; it spoke of how people felt “upset” and “unsafe and uneasy.” What’s notable is that no one quoted said the project’s conclusion was wrong or untrue.

Oh, if asked, the critics would surely bellow, “Well, of course it’s untrue!” But it’s no accident that they didn’t think to say it; in fact, this failure is typical today when fashionable emoters react to unfashionable science. These critics don’t think to call it untrue because the truth of the matter isn’t their focus. Ideology is.

It’s feelings over facts, emotion over education. But science doesn’t exist to make us feel good or bad; its purpose is the discovery of Truth via the scientific method. People who reject this, who subordinate Truth to agenda-driven lies, are dangerous to civilization. They also are hardly progressive — except insofar as they’re progressing toward ignorance.

On social media, Nikolas Cruz did not appear to be a peaceful man. He made quite clear his desire to perpetrate the exact type of violence of which he now stands accused.

Before he allegedly committed one of the worst mass shootings in US history at a Parkland, Florida, high school on Wednesday, police officials say Cruz wrote social media posts so threatening he was twice reported to the FBI.

He hurled slurs at blacks and Muslims, and according to the Anti-Defamation League, had ties to white supremacists.He said he would shoot people with his AR-15 and singled out police and anti-fascist protesters as deserving of his vengeance. Just five months ago, he stated his aspiration to become a “professional school shooter.”

If five months ago the South Florida office of the FBI had simply Googled the name Nikolas Cruz, checked the national data base on gun purchases in Florida or searched lists of expelled students for the named Nikolas Cruz they would have hit pay-dirt.

It just doesn’t make sense that with the resources available to law enforcement at every level and the algorithms available to Google and YouTube that Nikolas Cruz was never found.

http://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/bloody-google-page.jpg360640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2018-02-15 17:07:232018-02-15 17:15:24VIDEO: Do Google, and its subsidiary YouTube, have blood on their hands for the Florida slaughter?

The blame the bullet game has begun. Mourning families are still trying to understand what happened and Democrats are in their blame the gun and not the shooter mode.

Rather than focus on Nikolas Cruz who has been identified as the killer of 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, FL Kristine Rosen Gonzalez, a Democrat candidate for Congress, sent out a press release on February 15th, 2018 stating:

Kristen Rosen Gonzalez, candidate for the Democratic nomination in Florida’s 27th Congressional District, today issued a call for Congress to enact a $2 per bullet excise tax with the funds to be used to retrofit schools and to help with the treatment of victims of gun violence. Currently, about 12 billion bullets are sold in the U.S. annually.

[ … ]

“We fund our national highways through excise taxes on gas and diesel fuel”, Rosen Gonzalez said, “so highway users are the one who pay for that system. Doing the same with gun owners is just as fair.” [Emphasis added]

What Gonzalez should be focused on is that Nikolas Cruz was “expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for unspecified disciplinary reasons.” Cruz was adopted by Lynda Cruz, a widow. Postings under the name Nikolas Cruz included threatening comments under videos on YouTube and other sites, including “I whana shoot people with my AR-15” (sic), “I wanna die Fighting killing s**t ton of people” and “I am going to kill law enforcement one day they go after the good people.”

The FBI was warned in September about a possible school shooting threat from a YouTube user with the same name as the suspect in Wednesday’s campus massacre in Parkland, Florida, according to a video blogger.

Ben Bennight, the 36-year-old YouTube video blogger from Mississippi, noticed in September an alarming comment on a video he’d posted. He told CNN he immediately contacted the FBI.

“Im [sic] going to be a professional school shooter,” read the comment, left by a user with the name Nikolas Cruz, the same name of the suspected shooter who opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday, killing at least 17 people.

It was one of at least two alleged threat reports about the suspected shooter that the FBI received, according to a law enforcement official. In both cases, the FBI did not share the information with local law enforcement, the official said.

Perhaps Democrats in general and Rosen Gonzalez, in particular, should focus on why the FBI failed to take heed of the warning given to them. Maybe we need more federal agents to deal with these social media threats?

http://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/blood-flowing-out-of-bullet.jpg326570Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2018-02-15 12:20:042018-02-20 09:12:14FL Democrat calls for $2 Excise Tax per Bullet after Florida School Shooting. Why this is so very, very wrong.

“We’ve never seen a cut of this size and also a cut of this impact.” – Hans Van de Weerd an executive at the International Rescue Committee.

The slated closures, which are being reviewed by the State Department for final approval, follow President Donald Trump’s decision to dramatically reduce the number of refugees that will be allowed into the United States in 2018.

Warning!Although this is news you will find valuable, especially if you live near one of the soon-to-be-closed resettlement sites, remember that this is temporary and when Trump is no longer in the White House, the refugee industry will go in to high gear to make up for what they will call the lost Trump years!

In order for that not to happen, CONGRESS must dump or reform the Refugee Act of 1980!

Demonstrating that elections have consequences, it was only in 2016 that the State Department was on a high attempting to add about 47 offices to their roster of resettlement towns and cities. Now this….

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Refugee resettlement agencies*** are preparing to shutter more than 20 offices across the United States and cut back operations in more than 40 others after the State Department told them to pare their operations, according to plans seen by Reuters.

It should come as no surprise to you that refugee contractor employees like Hans here also support illegal aliens getting amnesty. It isn’t about humanitarian concern for refugees, but is about flooding America with immigrants, like Hans himself.

The State Department has said the drop in refugee numbers, from the 110,000 ceiling set by the Obama administration to 45,000 for 2018, means the country no longer needs all of the 324 resettlement offices that were operating at the end of 2017. This year’s cap on refugees is the lowest since 1980.

The offices, run by private non-profit agencies that contract with the U.S. government, provide a range of services to refugees, from assisting them in finding housing and jobs, to helping them navigate banking, medical care, school enrollment and other complexities of life in America. [Complexities=getting their welfare!—ed]

Opponents of the resettlement program say it is more costly to resettle refugees in the United States than it is to give aid to displaced people overseas.

“The changes will consolidate smaller affiliates, reduce costs and simplify management structures to help the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program run in a way that is fiscally responsible and sustainable in the long term,” State Department spokeswoman Cheryl Harris said in an email.

[….]

“We’ve never seen a cut of this size and also a cut of this impact,” said Hans Van de Weerd an executive at the International Rescue Committee, one of the nine resettlement agencies. [Why isn’t newshound Miliband quoted?—ed]

While the size of the U.S. refugee program has fluctuated over the years, it has never seen an across-the-board cut to dozens of offices in such a short period of time, he said.

Van de Weerd said the cuts could make it difficult for the United States to ramp up refugee numbers in the future. “It took years to build up this capacity,” he said. “Once you break it down it’s not easy to build it up again.”

Below is a screenshot of a portion of a very useful graphic Reutershas prepared. Click here to see the entire page.

***These are the nine federal contractors which refer to themselves as VOLAGs (Voluntary agencies, Ha! Ha!) which will lose some of their subcontractor offices (see list here before it is revised). The number in parenthesis is the percentage of federal funding each gets to place refugees in your towns.

They are paid by the refugee head thus the focus on Trump’s admission numbers.

On Valentines Day 2018 Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year old, decided to enter his former high school and began slaughtering students and faculty. Does this scenario sound familiar? It should because we knew, as a society, this was going to happen over and over again. We did not listen to those sounding the alarm bells. We turned a blind eye, and because we did there is blood flowing in our public schools and worse. We blamed everything and everyone but ourselves for this blood shed.

How did this happen? Answer: God was taken out of our schools.

God was taken out of public schools by United States Supreme Court on June 25th, 1962. In 1989 researcher David Barton published a book titled “America, to pray or not to pray?”

Barton asked:

It is impossible to know how many of the 39 million children were involved in daily verbal prayers, but most accounts indicate that a clear majority of the students voluntarily participated in daily school prayer.

Is it possible that the prayers that were being offered by these children and their teachers across the nation actually had any measurable, tangible effect?

The editorial staff of The Forerunner in 2008 published an op-ed titled “What Happened When the Praying Stopped.” The editorial staff looked at David Barton’s book and wrote about what Barton found in six areas:

Figure 1: SAT Total Scores. Basic data from the College Entrance Exam Board

Figure 1: The SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) is an academic test that measures the developed verbal and math reasoning of a student exiting from high school or some similar type of learning facility. The results of these tests are commonly used by colleges and universities to indicate the strength of a student’s academic preparation and his potential for success on the college level.

Figure 1 shows how drastically the actual knowledge of high school students began to drop at an accelerating rate after 1962. Barton notes in his report that the upturn in SAT scores since 1981 is due to the increase in private Christian educational facilities which began to flourish at that time. Statistics have proven that students from private Christian schools showed higher academic achievement and higher test scores.

Figure 2: Percentage of U.S. Teenage Girls Who Have Had Pre-Marital Intercourse.

Figure 2: This graph shows the increase in sexual activity in unmarried teen-age girls after the 1962 Supreme Court decision. It is evident from the figures provided that in the years previous to the removal of prayer the rates remained stable and relatively unchanged. In the post- prayer years the numbers immediately began to soar. The sudden increase on the graph appears as if a great restraining force had suddenly been removed.

Figure 3: Unwed women 15-19 years of age showed a phenomenal increase in the rate of pregnancies after the School Prayer decision. Note that the figure jumps drastically after the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision which made abortion legal in the U.S. The United States now has the highest incidence of teen-age motherhood in any Western country.

Figure 5: SINGLE PARENT HOUSEHOLDS. Female Head, No Spouse Present

Figure 4: For the 15-19 and 20-24 age group, the rates of youth suicide remained relatively unchanged during the years from 1946 to the School Prayer decision in 1962. But in the years since, suicides among the same group have increased 253 percent, or an average of 10.5 percent per year.

Figure 5: Stability in the family has also been affected since the 1962 decision. Divorce, single parent families, couples living together but not married, and adultery are areas of family breakdown which have experienced radical growth in recent years. In the graph above, the increase in single parent families (households with only a mother and children) are detailed. Note the dotted line at the bottom, which shows the rate of growth prior to the 1962 decision.

Figure 6: VIOLENT CRIME: Number of Offenses.

Figure 6: Crime, productivity, and national morality had been on a fairly stable level prior to the 1962 decision, but that is no longer the case. It is obvious that such a quantity of students praying for their nation had a very positive effect on the course that this nation had taken. The rate of violent crime, as shown above, has risen over 330 percent.

“One can argue, and some have, that the decision by the Supreme Court – in a series of three decisions back in 1962 and 1963 – to remove Bible and prayer from our public schools, may be the most spiritually significant event in our nation’s history over the course of the last 55 years,” Jeynes said.

[ … ]

Since 1963, Jeynes said there have been five negative developments in the nation’s public schools:

Academic achievement has plummeted, including SAT scores.

Increased rate of out-of-wedlock births

Increase in illegal drug use

Increase in juvenile crime

Deterioration of school behavior

Dr. Jeynes noted, “So we need to realize that these actions do have consequences. When we remove that moral fiber — that moral emphasis – this is what can result.”

Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision the top five complaints of teachers from 1940-1962 were talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls and getting out of turn in line. Since 1963 the greater concerns are rape, robbery, assault, burglary and arson.

EDITORS NOTE: Nikolas Cruz has been identified as the alleged killer of 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, FL. Cruz was “expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for unspecified disciplinary reasons.” Cruz was adopted by Lynda Cruz, a widow. Postings under the name Nikolas Cruz included threatening comments under videos on YouTube and other sites, including “I whana shoot people with my AR-15” (sic), “I wanna die Fighting killing s**t ton of people” and “I am going to kill law enforcement one day they go after the good people.”

Not for nothing, but the latest fruits of the sexual revolution are even more bizarre than most of us imagined.

We knew things would get a little freaky, but maybe we didn’t know it would involve an upswing in polygamy, amorous activities with plastic women, or cuddling sessions with electric candelabra.

But that is the state of affairs as we approach Valentine’s Day this year.

We shouldn’t be surprised. When a society deifies sexual expression, it deifies a jealous god who will not be satisfied until every biological, social, and moral norm is overturned.

Consider the upswing in open marriages. In a recent edition of The Chronicle Review, Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, a British-Canadian philosopher, argues that polygamy should be normalized. Jenkins practices polygamy (which she calls “polyamory”) with her husband, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, and her boyfriend, Ray Hsu.

Jenkins and her husband have been open about their polygamy since July 2011, shortly after their wedding. Jenkins notes that people are judgmental, “lecturing” her for taking part in something they consider unnatural and immoral.

But Jenkins responds that polygamy is quite natural and moral.

She argues that polygamy is the most natural relationship of all, as can be seen in the fact that very few animal species are monogamous. “Not even swans are monogamous,” she says. Not even swans.

She argues that polygamy is a moral way of life, with open marriages consisting of nothing more than ethical individuals being faithful to their multiple true loves.

Or, consider the emergence of sexual love with multiple sex dolls. Recently, The Guardian ran a story on James, a 58-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia. James, it turns out, is married to a human woman, Tine, but is also the owner of four life-size silicon sweethearts.

Two years ago, James’ wife left the home briefly to care for her ailing mother. Months later, she returned to find her husband surrounded by four new “ladies,” remarkable for their physical dimensions and their willingness to remain silent.

In short order, she learned that James had been “dating” the robots—taking them for picnics, watching television together, and engaging in, er, nocturnal activities with them.

James’ plastic princesses are the fruit of an emerging industry of animatronic, AI-enabled silicon sexbots. These sexbots are custom-made, complete with silicon body parts, heating and lubrication systems, and changing facial expressions.

The idea of sex robots is not new. In 2007, futurist David Levy published “Love and Sex with Robots,” in which he argued that robotic love would soon be embraced in the West.

In a recent interview, Levy argued that robotic love has many merits, as it could make prostitution obsolete, teach humans a greater variety of lovemaking positions, and provide pedophiles an outlet for their desire.

“Look. One has to accept that sexual mores advance with time, and morality with it,” Levy said in a recent interview. “Nothing can be ruled out.”

Recently, Inside Edition ran a story on Amanda Liberty, 33, of Leeds, England, who “married” her favorite chandelier. Liberty, who identifies as objectum sexual, says she just “knew” she would marry “Lumiere” the moment she first saw “her” on eBay last year.

In spite of the marriage, Liberty remains in an open relationship with her collection of more than 20 other lighting fixtures:

None of my chandeliers are jealous of each other. They understand that I love them all for their different personalities. For example, I love kissing and cuddling Lumiere, but I sleep with Jewel every night, as she is portable and very nice to cuddle.

Relentlessly true to the inner logic of the sexual revolution, polygamy, sexbots, and object-sex are part of the relentless drive to redefine marriage, sex, and romantic love. We are hard-wired for sex, according to this logic, but society must not cast judgment on our choice of sexual union.

But make no mistake. These latest iterations of the sexual revolution are unnatural and immoral. Their public emergence might tell us what “is” happening culturally, but it cannot tell us what we “ought” to do.

For the “ought,” we must turn, as our Founding Fathers did, to the Judeo-Christian view of humanity and sexuality. From it, we learn that God created human beings in his image and likeness, providing us with spiritual and moral guidance so that we could flourish and experience life’s goodness.

Central to this moral guidance is the truth that marriage and family are the core social units of society. Together they form the most important context in which children are shaped to understand themselves and their relationship with the world.

So, on Valentine’s Day this year, let’s make clear to our children and to society that marriage is between one man and one woman, and that any departure from that norm will leave us empty and pitiful in our attempts at sexual fulfillment.

After much speculation pertaining to the Trump administration’s official policy on transgender restroom policies, a White House spokeswoman indicated that the U.S. Department of Education won’t investigate any complaints regarding transgender restroom policies.

Spokeswoman Liz Hill told BuzzFeed News that specific kinds of transgender complaints may be investigated, but no bathroom complaints will garner the Department of Education’s scrutiny.

“Long-standing regulations provide that separating facilities on the basis of sex is not a form of discrimination prohibited by Title IX,” Hill said, explaining that the department will continue investigating sex-based stereotypes and sex discrimination against transgender individuals, but will not devote resources to the slew of transgender bathroom cases.

“Until now, the official position of the department has been that Title IX protects all students and that they were evaluating how that protection applies to the issue of bathroom access,” said the chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Catherine Lhamon, who disagrees with Hill’s statement that the DOE isn’t required to include transgender restroom policies under Title IX.

“This new categorical bar of civil rights protection for transgender children required to attend schools every day ignores the text of the law, courts’ interpretation of the law, the stated position of the department to date, and human decency,” Lhamon said, according to BuzzFeed News. “That interpretation represents an appalling abdication of federal enforcement responsibility, inconsistent with the law and with courts’ interpretation of the law, and totally lacking in human compassion for children in school, whom the department is charged to protect.”

The Education Department’s announcement comes after the Trump administration revoked a vague Obama administration order that forced taxpayer-funded schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice.

“This is a states’ rights issue and not one for the federal government,” then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters in February 2017.

Montana is considering adopting a measure requiring people to use the bathroom and locker room of their biological sex. The Locker Room Privacy Act says Montana residents must use the bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their birth gender rather than their gender identity, according to the Missoulian.

Maryland schools adopted a new policy in November, however, allowing transgenders to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice, according to The Washington Post.

A transgender student also won $800,000 from her Wisconsin high school in January after reaching a settlement in a lawsuit alleging staff had monitored her trips to the boys’ bathroom.

Ash Whitaker, who identifies as male, filed a lawsuit claiming that teachers had accompanied her to the boys’ bathroom and forced her to wear an identifying bracelet to single her out from other students. The Kenosha, Wisconsin, school board voted 5-2 to grant the $800,000 settlement.

Last week, Congress passed a continuing resolution that will keep the federal government funded through March 23.

This is the fifth continuing resolution of the fiscal year—a sixth may be needed before March 23, since both parties have agreed to begin debate on an immigration bill this week.

But as bad as the decision to continue funding the government through unamended short-term autopilot bills is, the two-year budget cap deal that passed along with the continuing resolution is even worse.

With the continuing resolution, Congress agreed to fund specific government programs at specific levels only through March 23. The larger budget deal set overall spending levels for two years. The breakdown of spending on specific programs after March 23 will be decided in future funding decisions.

But no matter how Congress divvies up the budget in the months ahead, the budget deal guaranteed that the end result will blow the top off the nation’s already rising debt.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the spending increases in the budget deal will drive next year’s budget deficit to almost $1.2 trillion, a level not seen since the beginning of President Barack Obama’s failed stimulus program.

This is a complete betrayal of everything limited-government conservatives fought for during Obama’s presidency.

It also is a betrayal of the limited-government vision the Trump administration outlined in its fiscal year 2018 budget. That document called for a $1.4 trillion reduction in discretionary spending over the next 10 years. By contrast, this bill sets up a path to dramatically increase discretionary spending.

But that’s not all. The bill also threw in more than $17 billion in tax loopholes to special interests, including tax rebates for rum producers in Puerto Rico, accelerated depreciation for racehorse investors, special expensing provisions for Hollywood producers, and tax subsidies for electric vehicles.

It even suspended the federal government’s $20.5 trillion debt limit through March 1, 2019. Suspending the debt limit functionally raises the borrowing authority of the federal government by over $1 trillion—and it does so without any effort to reduce or reform federal spending.

If you hoped that this budget deal would create the possibility for welfare or spending reform, I have bad news for you. By setting spending levels for the next two years, the deal has made passage of a budget resolution this year extremely unlikely.

Without a budget resolution, there can be no reconciliation process. And without a reconciliation process, any serious effort to reform welfare or spending is dead.

It is unclear what the Senate will do legislatively between now and the November elections. What should be clear to limited-government conservatives is that they have been completely abandoned by the Republican Congress.